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Our main inspiration [with Alix MacKenzie], I think, came from the Field Museum of Natural History, because they had pieces which were selected not for art content but for their relationship to the anthropological history of mankind.

Warren MacKenzie

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Warren MacKenzie
Age: 94 †
Born: 1924
Born: February 16
Died: 2018
Died: December 31
Artist
Ceramicist
Kansas City
Missouri
Warren Mackenzie
Warren Mac Kenzie
History
Field
Alix
Art
Fields
Mackenzie
Think
Mankind
Anthropological
Thinking
Pieces
Selected
Relationship
Museum
Inspiration
Museums
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More quotes by Warren MacKenzie

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[Shoji] Hamada seldom drew an exact drawing of a pot that he was going to make.
Warren MacKenzie
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This is something which I think I have been able to communicate to both people I have taught and people that have purchased our work since that time, that they all say, it's so nice to have these pots with us all the time and to eat out of them and be in direct contact with them in our homes.
Warren MacKenzie
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Remember, this is back in the 1940s, and it was sculpture which probably - in my instance probably came out of the European influence, [Alexander] Archipenko and things of that sort, [Jacques] Lipchitz to a certain extent, and I was influenced by those things and attempted to do work that emulated their style.
Warren MacKenzie
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Those two teachers [Kathleen Blackshear and Robert von Neumann] were just fantastic, I thought. They never directed you in a single direction, but they just encouraged you to think for yourself.
Warren MacKenzie
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I'm striving to make things which are the most exciting things I can make that will fit in people's homes. And in that respect, working on the wheel is economically about the only answer I know, because one can, as Leach said, make 50 pots in a day. You can make 100 pots in a day. A really good potter can make 400 pots in a day.
Warren MacKenzie
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It was a wonderful opportunity. And so for two and a half years we lived with [Bernard] Leach.
Warren MacKenzie
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[ Bernard] Leach was the one who taught us that, because he, too, had started out as a painter and an etcher and had only gotten into ceramics by chance when he was in Japan trying to teach the Japanese how to do etching, which, as he said, they were not ready for yet.
Warren MacKenzie
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We were more fortunate than most, because [Bernard] Leach had been in America on a lecture tour in 1950, and we made arrangements to travel from America back to England with him on the same boat. It was a very slow boat. I think it took us about seven days to cross the Atlantic.
Warren MacKenzie
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We were living with Bernard [Leach] in his home. He had a fantastic collection of early English and Japanese and Chinese and Korean pots and German pots, contemporary English work as well. And we had access to this collection.
Warren MacKenzie
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I used to think [Shoji] Hamada never drew, until there was a book by Bernard [Leach] published about his work [Hamada: Potter, Tokyo New York: Harper & Row, 1975] and at the rear of the book were a number of wonderful little sketches, but they were not drawings like Bernard made.
Warren MacKenzie
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We did respect [Bernard Leach], although we also were willing to challenge ideas and at least put forth our feelings about the way the pottery was run, about things that were done, about the pots we were making, etc. And we would get into sometimes some very fierce arguments. We'd be shouting at one another because of disagreements.
Warren MacKenzie
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I thought, oh, I'm going to be a painter. And eventually my family had moved near Chicago, and when I graduated from high school, I went to the Chicago Art Institute, and it was there that I thought, well, now I'm going to be a painter.
Warren MacKenzie
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We [me and my wife] went back to St. Paul, worked for a year - again, I guess I would have to admit now, doing a rather shaky job of teaching people - but at the end of that year we returned to England and worked in the [Bernard] Leach Pottery for two and a half years.
Warren MacKenzie
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I started to do silk-screen in the early days of my painting training, due to a woman who taught art history at the institute, Kathleen Blackshear. She was interested in silk screen and taught a class that I took.
Warren MacKenzie
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I took a number of graphic courses, lithography and etching and wood engraving [at Art Institute]. And particularly as I got more and more into ceramics, I thought, life drawing doesn't have anything to do with ceramics.
Warren MacKenzie
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Living with [Bernard] Leach, who thought about pottery 24 hours a day, was a fantastic experience, and we really began to get inside his mind and understand what had motivated him to work all his life as a potter.
Warren MacKenzie
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[Bernard Leach] talked about painting, but we never talked about ceramics in that evening. But at the end of the evening he said to us, Well, he said, I've changed my mind, and if you want, you can come back a year from now and apprentice in the workshop.
Warren MacKenzie
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The interesting thing was we never talked about pottery. Bernard [Leach] talked about social issues he talked about the world political situation, he talked about the economy, he talked about all kinds of things.
Warren MacKenzie
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And as far as I know about Alix's [MacKenzie] work, I don't believe she ever did any sculptural work at all. It was always pottery.
Warren MacKenzie
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Every pot is not going to be a masterpiece.
Warren MacKenzie